Various Positions (15 page)

Cohen was taken to a security area outside the waiting room, where he was guarded by a fourteen-year-old with a rifle. Arguing with the youth about his detention and his rights as a Canadian citizen had no effect. A commotion on the runway distracted the teenaged guard; several Cubans were being evicted from a plane, and when they resisted, an argument broke out. The guard ran to the scene and Cohen was left unguarded. He quickly repacked his bag and nervously walked to the plane, repeating to himself,
“It’s going to be OK; they don’t really care about me.” He climbed on board, telling himself not to look back, took a seat and didn’t move. No one asked for tickets. After a few anxious moments, the door shut, the engines started, and the plane began to taxi down the runway. He had escaped.

Eighteen months later during the Cuban missile crisis, Cohen’s brother-in-law, Victor Cohen, accused him of being pro-Castro and anti-American. Cohen responded with a lengthy politicized letter, saying that he opposed all forms of censorship, collectivism, and control and that he rejected all hospitality offered by the Cuban government to visiting writers during his stay. He wanted his brother-in-law to understand that he went to Cuba “
to see a socialist revolution,” not “to wave a flag or prove a point.” And although he saw many happy Cubans, he became anxious when he observed the long lines of “scared people outside the secret-police
HQ
waiting to see relatives, and the sound-trucks blasting the anthem, and the posters everywhere…. I left anti-government poems everywhere I went, I talked to painters and writers about their inevitable clash with Authority … and they dismissed me as a hopelessly bourgeois anarchist bohemian etc.” Although Cohen later suggested that his motives for going to Cuba were personal and slightly shabby, he took a lofty moral stance with his brother-in-law, writing,

When asked why he went to Cuba several years later, Cohen facetiously replied with bravado: a “
deep interest in violence …
I
wanted to kill, or be killed.”

Cuba was a time for writing as well as revolution, and in addition to poems, Cohen began a novel, of which only five pages survive. At one time called
The Famous Havana Diary
—although in the text the narrator says it might be titled
Havana was no exception
—it opens like a Raymond Chandler mystery: “
The city was Havana. That’s about all in the way of detail that you’re going to get from me.” It was a comic, largely autobiographical account of his stay. Cohen the moralist is glimpsed and there is evidence of his preoccupation with sex, his only loyalty, the narrator explains, although voyeurism sometimes suffices: “
I enjoyed her from a hundred eyes hung all over the room, telescope eyes, wide-angle eyes, close-up eyes, periscope eyes suspended in fluid.”

Cohen’s principal literary response to Cuba was poetic: “All There Is to Know about Adolph Eichmann,” “The Only Tourist in Havana Turns His Thoughts Homeward,” and “Death of a Leader”—all to appear in
Flowers for Hitler
—were written either in Havana or on the bus back from Miami.
The Energy of Slaves
contains “It is a Trust to Me,” also written there. Collectively, the poems express disillusionment with Castro as a genuine revolutionary, since his regime had become “
oppressive and repugnant.” Cohen declared in September 1963, “
Power chops up frightened men. I saw it in Cuba.”

————

IN EARLY MAY
, Cohen was back in Canada, after stopping in New York to see his friend Yafa Lerner. She remembers him as profoundly changed by the Cuban experience, more aware of his role as a Canadian poet grounded in the international scene. In Montreal, he told Layton
that Castro was “
a tragic figure.” In a later letter, he noted that “
Communism is less sinister under palm trees but Cuba is still no place for men bred in the freedom and corruption of North American cities. They are also too concerned with their artists. It makes you uneasy.”

On May 4 Cohen appeared on stage at the O’Keefe Centre in Toronto as part of the Canadian Conference of the Arts. He read his poetry (and that of Anne Hébert who was too nervous to read in French) surrounded by luminaries: Northrop Frye, Mordecai Richler, Jay Macpherson, Hugh MacLennan, and George Lamming, although Layton took the spotlight with a reading of his new poem about Jacqueline Kennedy, “Why I Don’t Make Love to the First Lady.” Layton reported that Cohen read beautifully and looked quite “
Dorian Grayish.”

By mid-May, Cohen was dealing with the publication and sudden fame of
The Spice-Box of Earth
. Unpacking copies of the book at the McGill bookstore, Marquita de Crevier, at one time romantically linked with Cohen, who gave her a gift of an actual Jewish spice-box, discovered that the books had been mistakenly bound with blank leaves. When Cohen heard of the mix-up, he said that had he been there to witness the event, he would have been unable to continue writing poetry.

Reaction to the finished book was enthusiastic and admiring. To mark its publication, a launch party was held at his mother’s house on May 27, 1961, with Layton and McClelland in attendance. The dustjacket, on what would become Cohen’s first Canadian hit, provided a romantic description of the poet:

The title, drawn from the spice-box that is blessed and then its contents inhaled after sundown on the Sabbath, marks the boundary between the sacred and the profane. The spice is a fragrant reminder of the link between the religious and the everyday, the holy and the unholy. From the celebration of nature in “A Kite Is a Victim,” the opening poem, to the destructive elements of history in the final “Lines from My Grandfather’s Journal,” the book displayed a joy balanced by tragedy. And the themes that would mark his mature poetry emerged: sexuality, history, Judaism, and love. Whether the subject was fellatio, Jewish mysticism, or death, a vision of promise characterized the work.

Expressing much of the tension found beneath the romanticism of the book is “The Genius.” It is a litany of possible Jews the narrator might become, from ghetto dweller to apostate to banker to Broadway performer to doctor. The poem reserves the most disturbing possibility for last:

Adulation greeted the book. The critic Robert Weaver found it powerful and declared that Cohen was “
probably the best young poet in English Canada right now.” Cohen’s friends Louis Dudek, Eli Mandel, and Stephen Vizinczey all praised it. Writer Arnold Edinborough suggested that Cohen had taken over from Layton as Canada’s major poet, and the critic Milton Wilson in “Letters in Canada 1961” declared
The Spice-Box of Earth
a significant book. The title of the review in
Canadian Literature
summarized the general response: “
The Lean and the Luscious.” And Desmond Pacey, in the second edition of his respected
Creative Writing in Canada
(1961), wrote that Leonard Cohen was “
easily the most promising” among a group of younger poets in the country that included Al Purdy and Phyllis Webb.

The Spice-Box of Earth
sold out in three months but failed to win the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. The winner that year was Robert Finch’s
Acis in Oxford
. Irving Layton thought this was an absolute travesty:

He also relates that Cohen was upset at not winning. “
Psychologically, I think he’s having a rough time of it,” Layton told Desmond Pacey. “It’s damn hard to be a young poet!” But if the Governor General’s jury wouldn’t acknowledge the power of
The Spice-Box of Earth
, the public did. The handsomely designed text continued to sell and won its designer, Frank Newfeld, a major publishing award.

A less publicized event that spring was Cohen’s adventure with Alexander Trocchi, a Scottish novelist on the lam from the U.S. for forgery and drug charges. Cohen put him up for a few days and had his first encounter with opium. Trocchi had a wad of it with him and prepared it by cooking it up on Cohen’s stove. Trocchi asked Cohen if he would like to lick the pot. Cohen could not resist but found it had little effect. He and Trocchi then headed out to a Chinese restaurant on Ste-Catherine Street but as they crossed the road, Cohen went blind and clutched at Trocchi before he fainted. Trocchi pulled him to the curb, where Cohen gradually recovered. A few days later, Cohen explained to Robert Weaver that he had just left Trocchi on a British ship bound for Scotland: “
His passport was two years expired so it was touch and go all the way. He fixed himself every half-hour … He’s a hell of responsibility. He wants you to feel that. That’s why he turns on in public. He’s a public junkie. I was glad when we got him on the boat.” Cohen’s poem “Alexander Trocchi, Public Junkie, Priez Pour
Nous” in
Flowers for Hitler
celebrates Trocchi’s bohemian flair. Cohen writes: “
Your purity”—of a Baudelairian darkness—“drives me to work. / I must get back to lust and microscopes.” A year or so later, Cohen would read
Cain’s Book
, Trocchi’s once-banned novel of 1960, and it would soon influence
Beautiful Losers
.

In late May Cohen received his Canada Council Arts Scholarship renewal, although only for one thousand dollars. Cohen told the supervisor of scholarships that the council’s investment would “
yield profits far out of proportion to the original risk. Within the year I promise you a book which will have some importance in our national literature.” He then boldly asked for a travel grant, arguing that “
distance is essential if I am to get any perspective in this messy semi-autobiography.” Before he left, Cohen acknowledged the planting of a tree in his honor by the local Hadassah Chapter of his synagogue, using the occasion to defend his controversial work: “
I remind them [Montreal Jews] that it is an old habit of our people to reject our most honest social critics, at least as old as Moses.”

————

BY AUGUST 1961
, Cohen was back in Greece, having spent twenty-one days on a Yugoslavian freighter headed for Genoa. Most of the passengers were retirees returning to Yugoslavia to live on welfare, and he tells his sister that “
they weep most of the day and eat large meals. Just like home for me.” He befriended the thirty-three-year-old captain, spending most nights musing on a destiny “
that makes one man the master of a ship, the other an itinerant poet, both exiles.” But he knows that he will soon be “
rooted on the rock of Hydra, working in that freedom which only an ocean between me and my birthplace can give me.”

On Hydra, “
his Gothic insincerities were purged” and his “style purified under the influence of empty mountains and a foreign mate who cherished simple English,” as he would write two years later. “
Thank god for hashish, cognac, and neurotic women who pay their debts with flesh,” he wrote McClelland, adding that the products of the island are “sponges, movies, nervous breakdowns, and divorces.” He
wrote Layton that he had seen corpses in the sea and witnessed “assassins’ drugs.” Layton was uncharacteristically indifferent: “
I gather the Greek wines are too strong for him,” he commented to a friend. Meanwhile, Cohen was still seeking extra funds, this time from an advance on royalties of
The Spice-Box of Earth
, encouraging McClelland to “
dig deep to keep Cohen out of the Clothing Business.”

Cohen was offered six thousand dollars for the house he had paid fifteen hundred for. But the house had given him roots, he later explained, and he was not ready to sell. Hydra freed Cohen from the inhibitions (and intrusions) of Montreal and made his writing less competitive and academic. He realized, however, the price of such isolation:

In Greece, he explained years later,
you “just felt good, strong, ready for the task” of writing. This last remark is a key to Cohen’s method of composition, whether in verse or in song. He cannot work unless he is “ready for the task,” in a state of creative concentration and well-being. Fasting often generated this state, and various friends recall his periods of almost week-long fasts while writing. Fasting also suited the holiness of his dedication to his work, supplemented by his desire for discipline.

Although Cohen experienced long fallow periods of nonproductivity, he retained a rigid daily schedule. Every morning, Cohen worked either on his terrace or in the long, low-ceilinged basement study of his home. Only the midday heat interrupted his work; he would then read, swim, and then return to his writing. In Greece, he wrote to Robert Weaver, “
there is my beautiful house, and sun to tan my maggot-coloured mind.”